Wrong Loaf

Kathleen almost drove past the records office. The whole building was dark except for one light near the front desk, a pale yellow rectangle glowing through two feet of blowing snow. She slowed the courier van and looked at it for a while.

Nobody should be in there. The county had sent an email at noon saying every office in McAllister County was closed. Every road except Route 9 was shut down, and Route 9 was barely holding on itself. She had been driving it for four hours with her teeth clenched and the radio off because the weather reports were just the same sentence over and over.

But there was a light. And she had a box to deliver.

Kathleen was twenty-four years old, three years into working for a regional courier outfit out of Duluth, and she had never once finished a route during a blizzard like this. Her supervisor had called it a mercy run. One last drop, misprinted tax forms that had to reach the records office before the fiscal deadline, and then a hotel room in town if she could get to one.

She parked in the lot, which was a flat white nothing with a buried pickup truck at one end. She grabbed the cardboard box off the passenger seat. It was heavy for paper. She zipped her coat, pulled her hat down, and trudged toward the door.

The lobby was dark except for that single emergency fixture above the front desk. It smelled like floor wax and old paper, the way a building smells when the heat has been running low all day. Kathleen stamped snow off her boots and set the box on the counter.

Then she saw him.

There was a man asleep in one of the waiting-room chairs against the wall. Long legs stretched out, coat over him like a blanket, head tipped back. Even half-buried in a winter coat she knew him.

"Reid?" she said.

He startled so hard he nearly fell out of the chair. His hand shot out and caught the armrest and he came up blinking, hair flat on one side, eyes trying to find something to focus on.

"Kathleen." His voice was rough with sleep. "What. What are you doing here."

"I could ask you the same thing." She stayed by the counter. "Building's supposed to be closed. It's like nine o'clock."

He sat up and rubbed his face with both hands. "I got off shift at the tower early and walked over to pick up my car from the shop." He was twenty-six, an air traffic controller up at the small regional field, and he had the look of a man whose whole day had fallen apart around hour two. "The shop closed early, and then the roads closed while I was standing in the parking lot like an idiot. The lobby door here was unlocked, so I came in out of the snow. My phone's dead. I've been sitting here for seven hours waiting for somebody to arrest me for trespassing."

"Six hours."

"Six hours." He looked at the clock on the wall and corrected himself. "Seven, maybe."

Kathleen set her keys down on the counter next to the box. "Well. Congratulations. Somebody finally came."

"Yeah." He was looking at her coat, her boots, the box. "You drove here. In this."

"Route 9's open. Barely. Nobody else is delivering tonight, so it's all mine." She tried to make it a joke. "Got the whole county to myself. Very peaceful."

"Was it terrifying?"

"Kinda, yeah."

The silence came in fast after that. It had been two years since they'd stood in a room together. Two years since she'd been twenty-two and packing up her half of an apartment while he sat on the bed not arguing, which had somehow been worse than arguing. The breakup had been mutual, on paper. Neither of them had ever acted very mutual about it afterward.

Reid stood up all the way and put his hands in his coat pockets. "So you have to get back to..."

"There's a motel in town. If I can get to it." She nodded at the box. "I need somebody to sign for this. Tax forms. Misprinted, but somebody downtown still wants them counted."

"Yeah, sure, of course." He came around the counter and she stepped back to give him room and the whole movement was stiff, like two people dancing a step they'd forgotten. He signed the tablet she held out. His handwriting hadn't changed. She noticed that and hated herself for noticing.

"Done," he said. "You're officially a hero of McAllister County."

"Don't let it go to your head."

He laughed a little at that, and for a second it was the old laugh, and then it wasn't, and the silence came back.

It was during that silence that she saw it.

His coat was unzipped at the top, pulled open where he'd slept in it. Underneath, where a flannel shirt should have been, there was a glimpse of something else. Silvery gray fabric. Soft looking. A neckline that curved the wrong way for a men's shirt.

Kathleen's brain did the math before she could stop it. She knew that neckline. She had owned a dress like that once. Worn it until the day she stopped being able to find it.

Reid followed her eyes down and went red so fast it was almost impressive. He grabbed the zipper and hauled it up to his chin in one motion.

"So," he said, way too loud. "Weather."

"Yeah. Weather," Kathleen said.

"Crazy out there."

"Real crazy."

He stood there with his coat zipped to his throat in an unheated lobby in northern Minnesota, staring at her like she was a cop and he was holding something. She decided, for reasons she didn't fully understand, to let him keep it. For now.

"I've got food," she said instead. "If you haven't eaten since, when, lunch?"

"Vending machine at four."

"Oh, Reid!"

"There were two options and one was trail mix with the raisins in it."

"God. Okay. Sit down!" She dragged another waiting-room chair over until the two of them faced each other with about three feet of dead air between them, and she pulled her lunch bag out of the courier satchel. "I made bread last night. It's... it has a quality."

"That sounds ominous."

"It should."

She unwrapped the loaf from its foil. It was dense and a little dark on top and it smelled like a bakery that had made one decision wrong. She cut two thick slices with the knife from the bag and handed one over.

Reid took a bite. Chewed. His face went through about four stages.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, wow!"

"I know."

"That's salt."

"That's salt, yeah." She took a bite of her own slice and made the same face. "I was on the phone with my sister while I made it and I doubled it. Then I panicked and added more flour, which apparently doesn't fix salt, it just makes a bigger saltier loaf."

Reid laughed. It came out of him sideways, half a cough, and then it turned into a real laugh, shoulders shaking, and she couldn't hold hers back either. They sat there in a dark government building during a blizzard, laughing over bread that could brine a turkey.

"Okay," he said, wiping his eyes. "Okay, but here's my question. You deliver packages for a living. You bake bread like this. Are you trying to get fired?"

"Kinda feels like it lately, yeah."

"How's that going? The job." He asked it carefully, like stepping onto ice.

"Fine. Fine. Long hours, bad coffee. You know." She picked at her slice. "How's the tower?"

"Same. Everyone yells at me, no planes listen." He shrugged. "It's fine too."

More quiet. But it was a different quiet now, softer around the edges. The storm hit the flat roof above them and the whole building hummed with it.

Kathleen looked at him across three feet of dark lobby. His coat was still zipped to his chin. His hair was still flat on one side. She had driven four hours through the end of the world to hand him a box of paper, and now she was sitting here sharing terrible bread with him, and some part of her had known this would happen from the second she saw the light in the window.

She reached into the bag for the second item and didn't look up. "There's also soup. It's not salty. One of the two things I did right yesterday."

"I'll be the judge of that," Reid said, and held out his hand for the thermos.

Reid unscrewed the thermos and poured. Steam curled up into the dim lobby and vanished. He drank, made a small approving sound, and held the cup with both hands like it was warm and he wasn't.

"Okay, that's good," he admitted. "That's actually good."

"Told you."

They ate in something close to comfort for a while. The storm kept up its low drum on the roof. Then Reid set his cup down on the tile between his boots and looked at the bread like it had asked him a question.

"I wasn't supposed to be here," he said.

"Nobody was supposed to be here. The county closed at noon."

"No. I mean tonight. At all." He rubbed his thumb along the seam of the cup. "I was at the tower this morning. I packed a bag. I put the dress in the bag. I was gonna take the weekend and drive up to Duluth."

Kathleen's hands went still on her own cup.

"To my apartment," she said. It wasn't a question but she said it like one.

"Yeah. To your apartment." He laughed, short and unhappy. "Then the storm turned and the highway closed and I did the dumb thing, the thing I always do, which is drive toward work because at least work makes sense. And then the shop was closed and my phone died and here I am. Six hours. In the dark. Wearing your dress."

"It wasn't... I mean, I bought it at a thrift store in Duluth, it was never..."

"I know whose dress it is, Kath." He said it quiet. Not angry. Just tired, the way you get tired after carrying something for a long time. "I've had it in my closet for two years. I moved twice and it moved with me both times. I don't have a great reason. I kept meaning to mail it back and I kept not doing that, and then last month I thought, what if I just drive it up there. Hand it over. See her face for ten seconds. That was everything. Ten seconds."

"Why ten seconds?"